For this assignment when looking for an example of “bad” writing, Steven Pinker’s “Why Academics Stink at Writing” was my first thought. Although it is an example of how to spot bad writing, it was bad writing in itself.  In the piece he talks about how academics “turn out prose that is turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand” (Pinker 1). When looking back through the piece, I found this funny because it seemed as though this is what he did, in my opinion. The sentence itself is a good example of this, being “bloated” by many unnecessary adjectives, “impossible to understand” with confusing descriptions (what makes writing “wooden”?), and in turn, “unpleasant to read.” Throughout the piece I found myself going back and rereading sentences, and sometimes entire paragraphs, due to getting lost in his wording.

Pinker also says, “They dress up the trivial and obvious with the trappings of scientific sophistication, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook” (2). Although this sentence itself is probably purposefully written to mock the use of “gobbledygook,” I found Pinker to be doing exactly what he said here throughout his piece. Pinker refers to the concept of using words to “dress up” the text, but he fails to avoid this himself. I found this piece very odd overall, it contrasted what it said to do by doing the opposite throughout the piece, which seemed hypocritical. Due to this, I find Steven Pinker’s “Why Academics Stink at Writing” to be “bad” writing.